As a first step towards a microscopic understanding of the effective
interaction between colloidal particles suspended in a solvent we study the
wetting behavior of one-component fluids at spheres and fibers. We describe
these phenomena within density functional theory which keeps track of the
microscopic interaction potentials governing these systems. In particular we
properly take into account the power-law decay of both the fluid-fluid
interaction potentials and the substrate potentials. The thicknesses of the
wetting films as a function of temperature and chemical potential as well as
the wetting phase diagrams are determined by minimizing an effective interface
potential which we obtain by applying a sharp-kink approximation to the density
functional. We compare our results with previous approaches to this problem.Comment: 54 pages, 17 figures, accepted for publication in Physica
